The All of Us Research Program is the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) largest precision medicine initiative, and it’s rooted in the idea that there is no “one size fits all” approach to medicine. The end result is one of the most significant biomedical data resources of its kind. The All of Us Researcher Workbench stores health data from a diverse group of participants from across the United States and its territories with a goal to inform a wide variety of health research questions.  

Leaders like Dr. Joyonna Gamble-George, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Public Health, and Dr. Karriem Watson, Chief Engagement Officer of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, know that idea not just to be a tagline but the truth.

“Our bodies are all different, and our levels of exposure are all different,” states Watson in an interview for The Health Pulse Podcast. “We collect millions of points of data, and then we can provide that data to researchers like Gamble-George who interrogate that data and work to understand how certain things impact individuals.”

Analyzing data efficiently is crucial, especially in areas where health care and health outcomes are at stake. But doing so quickly doesn’t matter if we can’t also do so in a trustworthy, transparent and ethical way.

“There’s a long history of skepticism towards research. But it’s equally important to recognize the significant strides we’ve made to enhance the trustworthiness and effectiveness of research,” says Gamble-George on The Health Pulse Podcast. “Researchers are increasingly expected to make their data sets publicly available, which bolsters the reproducibility of research.”

The NIH has added SAS Analytics Pro on SAS Viya to the All of Us Researcher Workbench, allowing researchers to explore data contributed by All of Us participants, who reflect the rich diversity of the United States and its territories, including communities that have historically been underrepresented in biomedical research.